Uncertainty is a muscle you never trained

Instability has reached the point where it produces a permanent background hum of worry, and one capability has re-emerged as the marker of modern leadership. Tolerance for uncertainty is the ability to sit inside not knowing for long enough to spot the opportunity hiding in it.

Uncertainty stopped being an interval between stable periods some time ago. Transformative artificial intelligence, geopolitical tension and cascading economic disruption have made it the permanent backdrop. The awkward part is that leaders are expected to decide anyway, with less information than their predecessors had and on a shorter clock.

The good news is that this is a trainable capability rather than a fixed personality trait. It develops and strengthens with deliberate practice. Three principles carry most of the work, and there is a questionnaire further down this article so you can place yourself against them.

• Anchor yourself in what does not change.
• Build in order to learn.
• Row in the fog.

The problem	The reason	The solution
Low tolerance for uncertaintyPermanent uncertainty paralyses decisions, investment and teams. Without reference points, urgency and strategy blur into each other, and the loudest problem wins the calendar.	Uncertainty gets minimised or dramatisedLeaders either dismiss the signal or inflate it, and analytical rigour then gives way to instinct. The result is rigidity in one direction and avoidable error in the other.	Anchors, experiments and approach modeBenjamin Chaminade’s position: fixed points serve as anchors, experiments accelerate learning, and approach mode governs how you act. Row with your eyes open rather than waiting for the fog to lift.

What tolerance for uncertainty actually is

Before working on the three principles, the concept deserves a definition. Uncertainty is old enough to sit inside the VUCA model, the military acronym covering volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that became unavoidable in management. It was never replaced by BANI, whatever the novelty hunters claim. It was replaced by fragility.

A definition with two dimensions

Uncertainty has two components in my reading. The first is the impossibility of knowing every piece of information about a given situation. The second is the difficulty of forecasting the nature and the effects of changes still to come. Most leadership discomfort comes from treating these as one problem.

Separating them helps, because they call for different responses. Missing information is a research problem with a cost and a deadline attached. Unforecastable change is a design problem, and no amount of research closes it.

I set the frame out in full in my article on VUCA management, and the comparison with the newer acronym sits in VUCA against BANI.

The two traps: underestimating and overestimating

Underestimating uncertainty produces the famous misjudgements. Kenneth Olsen, then head of Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977 that there was no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. The error looks obvious now and felt reasonable at the time. That gap is the danger.

Overestimating uncertainty is the mirror image and it gets far less attention. A leader convinced that nothing can be known abandons analytical rigour entirely and decides on instinct, which feels decisive and performs badly. Both traps end in the same place: a decision disconnected from evidence.

The work sits in the balance between them. That balance is made of specific behaviours, and behaviour can be assessed and trained.

What Australian directors are reporting

Australian boardrooms are living this. The Australian Institute of Company Directors found that 25% of directors said global economic conditions had curtailed their investment plans, and that more than half say the pace of change outstrips their organisation’s capacity to absorb it.

Those figures come from the Director Sentiment Index for the first half of 2026, released on 16 April 2026 and based on 828 directors surveyed by Roy Morgan between 20 February and 10 March. The AICD publishes the full release.

Read the second figure again. More than half of Australian directors believe change is arriving faster than their organisation can process it. That is a capability gap rather than a market condition, and capability gaps are the kind of problem a leadership team can actually act on.

Anchor yourself in what does not change

Certainty in some parts of your life makes it easier to hold steady against uncertainty in others. For a leader, an anchor might be the values of the organisation or a commitment to serve a particular customer. Clarifying what stays constant equips you for whatever else arrives.

Principled decisions beat predicted outcomes

Brian Chesky faced this directly. Airbnb was preparing one of the largest technology listings in history when the pandemic arrived, and the company went from an imminent float to a collapse in bookings. His response was to decide from principles rather than from forecasts.

In his message of 5 May 2020, Chesky told staff that revenue for the year was forecast to be less than half of what the company earned in 2019, and he set out the principles the reduction would follow: mapping every reduction to the future strategy, doing as much as possible for those affected, staying committed to diversity, communicating one to one, and waiting until every detail was settled. Airbnb published the message in full.

The distinction he drew is the useful part. A business decision predicts the best possible outcome, and a principled decision holds regardless of the outcome. When the forecast is worthless, only the second kind of decision is available, and Airbnb listed later that same year.

A purpose that rules things out

An anchor earns its name by excluding options. A purpose statement that has never caused an organisation to decline revenue is decoration, and every leadership team knows which of the two it owns. The test is uncomfortable and it takes about a minute.

Patagonia rewrote its mission in 2018 to say that it is in business to save our home planet. Whatever you make of the wording, the company then used it to rule decisions out. Ruling options out is what separates an anchor from a slogan on a wall.

Run the test on your own organisation. Name the last decision where your stated values changed the answer. If nobody in the room can produce one, your anchors will not hold the next time the fog arrives.

Build in order to learn

When things look uncertain, the first reflex is usually to plan. In a fast moving environment, too much time spent planning comes at the expense of progress. Rapid experiments are learning instruments. They stop a team talking about an idea instead of building it and testing it.

Never come to a meeting without a prototype

That instruction was the working rule at IDEO, the design consultancy, and it survives because it changes the shape of a discussion. A meeting about an idea produces opinions. A meeting about an object produces evidence. Across a year of decisions, that difference adds up.

We cannot predict the future, and we can influence it by questioning current models through experiments. The practical version borrows from lean startup practice and the minimum viable product: prototype an offer quickly and put it in front of customers iteratively, rather than developing it internally until somebody declares it ready.

Generative tools have made this cheaper than it has ever been. The constraint on experimentation inside most organisations is no longer the cost of building. That removes the last respectable excuse.

Turning waiting time into innovation days

Danielle Feinberg, a visual effects supervisor at Pixar, felt the uncertainty in her industry. Fewer people were going to the cinema, budgets were tighter and her team had to do more with less. Under that pressure, her colleagues felt they had no room left to innovate.

During each film’s development, Pixar holds review days with its braintrust, a group of senior creative leaders, which leaves the rest of the team waiting for feedback. Feinberg proposed turning those waiting days into innovation days, where people worked on whatever they wanted, even with no practical application, and then shared what they made. Setting up a review group of that kind has its own rules, which I set out in organising a braintrust like Pixar.

One team member spent a day on a technical hack he had always wanted to try and never had time for, repurposing an animation tool. It ended up letting the team solve a problem in hours instead of weeks. The day was not designed to maximise productivity, and building led to learning, which led to progress. Setting days like these up so they produce something durable is a question of design, and my innovation strategy that starts with people rather than process sets out the four groups it takes.

Several models before the right one

The capacity to pivot quickly, to test assumptions and to learn from mistakes sits at the centre of organisations that navigate uncertainty well. Very few of them arrived at their model on the first attempt, and the ones that talk honestly about it are more useful than the ones that do not.

Slack is the cleanest example. It began inside a company building an online game, and the messaging tool was the internal system the team built for itself while the game failed. The product that succeeded was a by-product of the experiment that did not.

That pattern is common and it is rarely planned. An organisation that runs enough experiments gives itself the chance to notice the by-product, and an organisation that runs none has nothing to notice.

Row in the fog

When we read uncertainty as a threat, blood moves away from the brain and towards the body as we prepare to fight or to flee. This is why stressed leaders double down on a fixed plan or turn away from their own discomfort, and both responses feel like decisiveness from the inside.

Threat mode against approach mode

When we read uncertainty as a chance to learn instead, we enter what I call approach mode, close to the challenge state that Jim Blascovich and colleagues measured in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Blood vessels dilate, more oxygen reaches the brain and we become able to explore new ways of thinking. The same situation produces two different physiologies depending on the frame applied to it.

Carol Dweck at Stanford popularised the related distinction through her work on mindset. People who treat their abilities as malleable take on challenges, persist through obstacles and read effort as the route to mastery. People with a fixed mindset avoid challenges, give up more readily and treat failure as proof of an intrinsic limit.

The leadership implication is direct. The frame you put on an ambiguous situation, out loud and in front of your team, determines which physiology the room operates in for the rest of the meeting.

From know-it-all to learn-it-all

When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, the company had missed the turns towards mobile and cloud computing, its flagship products looked dated, and teams operated in silos competing against each other rather than collaborating. The technical problems were real and the cultural one was larger.

Nadella introduced a shift from a know-it-all culture towards a learn-it-all culture. It changed how leaders made decisions, how they responded to feedback and how they handled mistakes, with failures treated as opportunities to learn rather than as verdicts. A learn-it-all culture asks the most experienced people to give up the authority their knowledge buys them, which is why the art of unlearning is a status problem long before it becomes a mental one.

The pivot towards a cloud-first model was risky and it took time to show results. He held the direction without flinching through the period when the evidence had not yet arrived. Most retellings skip that stretch, and it is the one that matters.

Train it, coach it or hire it: building tolerance for uncertainty

Leadership teams that accept the argument usually ask what to do about it, and three routes are available. Each one suits a different starting position, and picking the wrong one wastes a year and some credibility. The comparison below sets out what each delivers.

The three routes compared

Training builds the habit across a group at low cost per head. Coaching changes one leader deeply and slowly. Hiring for the trait shifts the average without touching anyone already there. Most organisations need the first, believe they need the third and end up funding the second.

Criterion	Train the team	Coach the individual	Hire for the trait
What it changes	A shared habit of deciding on incomplete information, and a shared vocabulary for saying so.	One leader’s default response to ambiguity, reaching how they behave under real pressure.	The composition of the team, bringing in people who already operate comfortably in fog.
Time to visible effect	One to two quarters, and the first sign shows up in how meetings end.	Two to four quarters, and the change is often invisible to anyone outside the relationship.	Six to twelve months once notice periods and onboarding are counted.
Cost per person affected	Lowest, because the group shares the session and the language afterwards.	Highest, since the investment reaches exactly one person at a time.	Recruitment cost plus the risk that a strong hire meets a culture that punishes the trait.
Main failure mode	A good session followed by a manager who still asks for more data before every call.	One changed leader inside an unchanged system, which usually ends in their departure.	The new arrival adapts to the existing caution within a year and stops behaving differently.
Best fit	A management population that waits for permission and knows it does.	A single senior leader whose caution is the bottleneck for everyone below them.	A genuinely new capability area where nobody internally has ever operated.

How to choose your route

Diagnose where the waiting happens and let that choose the route. Budget availability is the wrong starting point. The bottleneck sits with one person, with a management layer or with the organisation’s standing rules, and each location points at a different route. Five questions get you to the answer.

1. Identify the last three decisions that stalled, and write down who everyone was waiting for.
2. If the same name appears in all three, the bottleneck is individual and coaching is the route.
3. If different names appear but the behaviour is identical, the bottleneck is a habit and training is the route.
4. If people were waiting on a rule or an approval threshold, change the rule before spending anything on people.
5. Only consider hiring when the capability genuinely does not exist internally and cannot be built in a year.

Most organisations discover the third answer and dislike it, because removing an approval threshold costs nothing and implicates whoever set it. That is also why it is the fastest available improvement.

Assess your own tolerance for uncertainty

The questionnaire below puts a number on where you stand against the three principles in this article. It takes about ten minutes, it scores each principle separately, and the section scores matter more than the total because they tell you where to aim.

How the questionnaire works

Twenty-one statements run across three sections of seven, one section per principle. You rate each statement from one to five, where one means strong disagreement and five means strong agreement. Nothing is stored anywhere, and you can email yourself the results at the end.

Answer quickly rather than carefully. The first response is usually the accurate one, and a considered answer tends to describe the leader you intend to be rather than the one who turned up to last Tuesday’s meeting.

How to read your score

The total runs out of 105 and places you on one of four levels. The more useful number is the gap between your three section scores, because an even profile and a lopsided one call for completely different work even when the totals match.

• A low anchoring score means starting with values and non-negotiable principles, before anything else.
• A low building score means starting with one small experiment this week, without waiting for a plan.
• A low fog score means working on the frame you put on ambiguity, out loud, in front of your team.

How I can help you master this topic

Reading about uncertainty tolerance changes very little on its own, because the capability is behavioural and behaviour only changes through repeated practice. That is the work I do with executive teams and with management populations, and it runs through two formats designed to fit together.

Keynotes that reframe uncertainty for a whole room

For executive committees and larger gatherings, I run sessions built on the three principles in this article, using examples that survive scrutiny. The aim is a room that leaves with one vocabulary for ambiguity and an honest view of which principle it is weakest on.

These work best when the leadership team attends together, since the frame a group puts on uncertainty is collective rather than individual. Participants leave with the questionnaire, their scores and a first action for their weakest section.

The fog challenge workshop for managers

For management populations, I run the fog challenge as a working session. Participants meet deliberately blurred scenarios under a strict time limit, decide anyway, and then work through a structured debrief that examines what all of that waiting was actually protecting.

The session suits groups of managers who share a population of teams, because the habit spreads sideways rather than downwards. Tell me about your situation and I will tell you honestly which format fits it.

Tolerance for uncertainty is trained rather than inherited

Uncertainty is the permanent backdrop now, and more than half of Australian directors already say that change arrives faster than their organisation can absorb it. Waiting for conditions to settle is a strategy with no end date attached to it, and it is still a decision.

Three principles carry the work. Anchor yourself in what does not change, so that principled decisions are available when forecasts are worthless. Build in order to learn, because experiments produce evidence that planning cannot. Row in the fog, because the frame you put on ambiguity decides what your team is physically able to think.

In an unstable world, standing still is the only real threat. Tolerance for uncertainty is a capability you build, train and keep in condition, and the questionnaire above will tell you in ten minutes which of the three principles is currently letting you down.

Frequently asked questions about tolerance for uncertainty

These are the questions leaders put to me once they accept that waiting for clarity is itself a decision. Each answer is short enough to use in a leadership meeting, and each one points at something you can change this quarter.